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Weird News

At least 287 polling station workers and 18 police officers have died mainly from exhaustion and illnesses associated with overwork after Indonesia's elections this month, officials said on Monday (April 29).

The world's fourth-largest country held the legislative and presidential elections in a single day for the first time on April 17, but the high death toll have prompted public calls for the polls to be held separately."So far, 287 election workers across the country have died and 2,095 have fallen ill," said Mr Arief Priyo Susanto, spokesman for the General Election Commission.

"The main cause of the deaths is exhaustion and some accidents and illnesses caused by exhaustion," he added.The electoral commission said a total of 150 workers died from similar causes during the 2014 presidential and legislative elections, which were held three months apart.

More than seven million workers were involved in what many experts described as the world's largest and most complicated single-day election, with voting and vote-counting conducted manually. Nearly 193 million Indonesians were eligible to vote, with the turnout estimated at 81 per cent.Voters elected a president, 575 members of the House of Representatives, 136 members of the Regional Representative Council and almost 20,000 members of local legislatures.

Officials said holding the elections simultaneously was a cost-saving measure, but it has proved to be a massive logistical challenge to distribute ballot papers and ballot boxes across the far-flung archipelago.National police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo said 18 officers also died from working long hours during the elections. The government has promised to provide compensation of up to 36 million rupiah (S$3,460) for surviving families.

There are fears the sunken vessels off
Indonesia, which are the graves of 2,200 people, may have been salvaged for
metal
An international investigation has been launched into the mysterious disappearance
of three Dutch second world war shipwrecks which have vanished from the bottom of
the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia.

HNLMS De Ruyter

The Netherlands defence ministry has confirmed
that the wrecks of two of its warships which sunk in 1942 have completely gone,
while large parts of a third are also missing.
The wrecks were first found intact by amateur divers in 2002. But a new expedition
to mark next year’s 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Java Sea discovered
the ships were missing.
While sonar shows the imprints of the wrecks on the ocean floor, the ships
themselves are no longer there.

The ministry said in a statement: “The wrecks of HNLMS De Ruyter and HNLMS
Java have seemingly gone completely missing. A large piece is also missing of HNLMS
Kortenaer.”
All three ships sunk during the Battle of the Java Sea, which turned out to be a
disastrous defeat for Dutch, British, American and Australian sailors by Japanese
forces in February 1942. It was one of the costliest sea battles of the war and led
to the Japanese occupation of the entire Dutch East Indies.
About 2,200 people died, including 900 Dutch nationals and 250 people of Indonesian
Dutch origin, and the wrecks have been declared a sacred war grave.

“An investigation has been launched to see what has happened to the wrecks,
while the cabinet has been informed,” the defence ministry said. “The
desecration of a war grave is a serious offence,” it added, suggesting the
wrecks may have been illegally salvaged.
The seas around Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are a graveyard for more than 100
ships and submarines sunk during the war. For years, scavengers have
surreptitiously located the wrecks and stolen parts, including steel, aluminium and
brass.

A recreational diving school in Malaysia told the New Straits Times last year that
shipwrecks were being blown apart by with explosives by people posing as fishermen
before their metal is removed.
The US military found two years ago that there had been an “unauthorised
disturbance of the grave site” of the USS Houston, which sunk in the Battle
of Sunda Strait, also in the Java Sea. It is the grave for nearly 650 sailors and
marines.

Theo Vleugels, director of the Dutch War Graves Foundation, told the ANP news
agency: “The people who died there should be left in peace.”

They appear on the sand like any old piece of
sea detritus. Sometimes they're found, amid the sweet wrappers and cracked
shells, by volunteers cleaning up the area. Other times a holidaymaker might
glimpse the grisly discard from the corner of their eye, a serene walk along the
beach interrupted just like that.

As more people learned about these
discoveries, they attracted morbid scavengers to the Pacific Northwest
shorelines, where the Salish Sea connects waterways along the west coasts of the
US and Canada.
What these scavengers sought remains a prickling curiosity: severed feet attached
to running shoes, washed up from origins unknown.
Sixteen detached human feet have been found since 2007 in British Columbia,
Canada, and Washington state. Most of these have been right feet. All of them
have worn running shoes or hiking boots. Among them: three New Balances, two
Nikes and an Ozark Trail.
The most recent one turned up this week.
Charlotte Stevens, of British Columbia, was taking a walk with her family on
Vancouver Island, the CBC reported, when her husband spotted something in the
sand.
It was a shoe, that they could see right away. But a closer inspection revealed
something more.
"He picked it up and brought it out on to the beach," she told CBC, "and we had a
look at it for about five minutes and we thought, 'it almost looks like there is
an actual foot bone in it'."
Sure enough, the BC Coroners Service confirmed that the shoe came with a
dismembered foot. As with the others, there's no telling for exactly how long the
foot was in the water, but the regional coroner Matt Brown said the exact model
of shoe had gone on the market after March 2013, indicating that it once belonged
to someone who went missing between then and last December.
Mr Brown is working with the police to connect the foot to individuals who
disappeared from the area around that time.

If history is any indication, however, the identity associated with the foot will
stay a mystery.
Over the years, armchair sleuths and scientists alike have used a number of terms
to describe the feet: severed, dismembered, detached, disarticulated.
Found, but still lost.
After the first two feet – both right – were found in British
Columbia just six days apart from one another, locals began sounding the alarm,
and authorities expressed equal surprise.
"Two being found in such a short period of time is quite suspicious," Corporal
Garry Cox, of the Oceanside Royal Canadian Mounted Police, told the Vancouver Sun
in August 2007.
"Finding one foot is like a million to one odds," Corporal Cox said, "but to find
two is crazy. I've heard of dancers with two left feet, but come on."
Five more were found in the next year, including one near Pysht, in the state of
Washington. Speculation increased, as recounted in a 2008 article in the Toronto
Star:
"Speculation ranges from natural disasters, such as the tsunami of 2004, to the
work of drug dealers, serial killers and human traffickers.
"One theory concerns a plane crash off Quadra Island three years ago with five
men aboard. Only one of the bodies has been found.
"Other theorists believe the coastline is being used as a body dump for organised
crime activity; a third scenario is a serial killer is at work."

But to the disappointment of many a conspiracy theorist, science suggests more
mundane answers.
Writing for the Pacific Standard, Spenser Davis pointed out last year that a
study on the Puget Sound found that when a body floating in water is "subjected
to the push and pull of its environment", the bones of hands and feet are almost
always the first to fall off.
In British Columbia, two of the feet have since been identified as having
belonged to people with mental illness, while three others were linked to
individuals who probably died of natural causes.
Foul play is not suspected in any of the other cases, though it hasn't been ruled
out, either.
"All of the ones who've been identified so far, there's no mystery," Gail
Anderson, a criminologist at British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, told the
Daily Beast in 2011. "These people were very depressed, unhappy about life, and
were last seen heading toward the water. People jump off bridges. They
deliberately wish to disappear."
But there are other points of strangeness. For one, why did the feet start
turning up only after 2007, and why have they continued to turn up with
unprecedented frequency since then?
The Daily Beast considered the power of the "vicious cycle" theory, which
suggests that once people became aware of the phenomenon, they started
subconsciously – or completely deliberately, in some cases – scanning
the shorelines for shoes. Also a likely answer.
And yet – it's hard not to wonder.
"There are so many coincidences taking place," forensics consultant Mark
Mendelson​ told the Daily Beast in 2011. "Everybody who jumps off a bridge
is wearing runners? ... Until you can show me something pathologically concrete
that this is a natural separation of that foot from a body, then I'm saying
you've got to think dirty."

Beijing: Bulldozers unexpectedly demolished part of a
hospital and its adjoining morgue in central China, sending doctors, nurses and
patients fleeing and burying under rubble six bodies being processed at the
morgue, reports say.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported that the hospital
accused the local government of ordering the demolition work after failing to get
the hospital to agree to it for a road expansion project.
The No.4 Hospital of Zhengzhou University in Henan province said the unexpected
demolition work on Thursday morning buried six bodies stored in the morgue,
caused nearly 20 million yuan ($4.3 million) worth of damage to medical equipment
and injured several hospital staff, according to Xinhua.
"Burying the remains of patients is enormously disrespectful to the dead," the
hospital's deputy propaganda chief, Zhang Yuan, was quoted as saying.
"I never imagined anything like this would ever happen."
The Huiji District Government Information Office said in an online statement on
Thursday evening that they had asked the hospital in vain to demolish the CT room
and morgue itself.
It said workers had made sure there were no people inside the buildings before
tearing them down, and there had been no casualties.

The zombie is a simple
creature with simple tastes, enjoying leisurely walks on the beach, dining out
with hordes of its friends, and every now and then having a good tumble down a
flight of stairs. It behaves this way because the pathogen that has infected it
doesn’t require complex behaviors in order to replicate — it commands
a hungry, nearly indestructible vessel that can walk it right up to its next
potential host.
But on our planet there exist zombified ants that undergo a decidedly more
complex, and more disturbing, transformation at the hands of highly sophisticated
parasitic fungi that assume control of the insects’ minds. What ensues
between a host and a parasite with no brain of its own is a battle that is far
stranger and far more methodical than anything ever dreamed up by Hollywood. (The
zombifying fungus that attacks humans in the videogame The Last of Us comes close, but its real-life counterpart is much, much weirder.
And you don’t have to pay 60 bucks to see it, which is nice.)
For many of us it’s hard to feel for ants, what with them ruining picnics
or even entire cities, but it’s downright disquieting to watch one
infected by these parasitic fungi — species in the genus Ophiocordyceps
that each, incredibly, attack only a single species of ant. Once a disciplined
member of a rigidly structured society, the affected ant stumbles out of its
colony like the town drunkard, guided by a pathogen that has pickled its brain
with a cocktail of chemicals.
The ant heads, at the behest of the fungus, to a precise position in the forest.
Scientists plotting the coordinates of these unfortunate ants have documented a
striking regularity to their travels, making the pathogen a bit like GPS for the
insect, only, you know, the ant never asked for directions.

The ants “are manipulated to bite onto very specific locations on the
underside of a leaf, the main vein of a leaf, leaves orientated north, northwest,
roughly 25 cm off the ground,” said David Hughes, a behavioral ecologist at
Penn State. “And all of this happens with a remarkable precision around
solar noon, making this one of the most complex examples of parasite manipulation
of host behavior.”
It’s a position chosen by the fungus, rather unbelievably, for its ideal
temperature and humidity — Hughes has experimented with this by moving the
ants out of these spots to drier, hotter areas, where the fungus failed to grow.
Once the ant has anchored itself by sinking its mandibles into the leaf’s
vein, it perishes, and from the back of its head erupts a stalk, which, while in
a way is quite beautiful, might be considered the world’s least desirable
hat. This in turn rains spores down onto the ant’s fellow workers below,
attaching to their exoskeletons and beginning what could euphemistically be
called an invasive procedure.

“In order to get through [the exoskeleton], the fungus builds up a
pressure,” said Hughes. “We know from studies of fungal parasites of
plants, particularly rice, they can build up a pressure inside their spore
equivalent to the pressure in the wheel of a 747. So they have a massive buildup
of pressure, and when that’s at a sufficient level then they blow a hole
through the wall and blow all the genetic material” into the ant.
Thus the cycle begins anew.

According to Hughes, in
addition to the 160 known species of ant-controlling fungi, there may be some
1,000 additional varieties out there to be discovered. These don’t even
account for the array of additional parasitic fungi that exclusively target
specific species of other insects, from beetles to butterflies (let’s face
it, butterflies could use to get taken down a notch or two).
The relationship is a remarkable illustration of host-parasite coevolution that
scientists are just beginning to understand — fossil records of
bite-scarred leaves show this has been happening (.pdf) for at least 48 million years
— with ant-hunters, each dependent on a single species, developing
astounding adaptations to survive. And in response, the ants have evolved their
own brilliant defenses, far beyond anything you learned
from SimAnt.
“The fungus needs to transmit,” said Hughes, “and it cannot do
that inside the nest, because in order for ant societies to work, they have
necessarily evolved a prophylactic immune system, which is reliant upon
behavioral defense. So they have something called social immunity. They simply
stop diseases spreading inside their nest by finding diseased individuals and
moving them out.”
Despite the ants’ countermeasures, these fungi are extremely virulent and
can, as if trying to show off, wipe out whole colonies. Left unchecked, the fungi
might conceivably drive themselves and their ant hosts to extinction. But this is
where the tale gets stranger. The parasitic fungi themselves have their own parasitic fungi.
The very success that allows the fungi to build up what Hughes calls “graveyards in the forest” also “invites other
organisms to come in and infect them,” he said. “And these
hyperparasitic fungi castrate the zombie ant fungi. So the zombie ant fungi rely
upon a spore body that releases spores and continues to cycle, and the other
parasite comes in and whacks it out.” In one study Hughes found that only
6.5 percent of a zombie ant fungi’s fruiting bodies produced viable spores.
The whole weird circus is still somewhat mysterious, but Hughes is studying
infected ants in the lab to figure out what kinds of chemicals the fungi are
using to achieve mind-control, and how exactly mind-control affects transmission.
These species, after all, are not alone among fungi in their psychoactive
tendencies. LSD was synthesized from ergot, a rye-loving fungus theorized, though
far from proven, to have tripped out the poor souls accused in the Salem Witch
Trials, which it turns out wasn’t nearly as groovy of a situation as it
sounds, on account of all the capital punishment.
“We’re discovering that over half of life on Earth is
parasitic,” Hughes said. “It’s the most common mode of
existence in the history of life on Earth. But only a tiny minority of parasites
do mind-control. And why is that? What is the push in order to control the
behavior of your host?” Other than to enjoy a leisurely stroll on the
beach, of course.

MELTING PERMAFROST = CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE
CHANGE

In a chaotic world of downed planes, ethnic
unrest and missile strikes, international observers settled their
attention elsewhere earlier this month. They looked north to Siberia, a land
covered in snow and layered in permafrost, where a
strange and giant crater had just ripped open the earth. At the time,
no one knew where exactly the crater had come from, what was at its bottom, or how
it had come to be.
There are sure to be even more questions now.
Two new craters have emerged in Siberia, deepening the giant hole saga. Though
not as big as the first crater, which extended hundreds of feet in diameter, these
new craters are just as strange.

The original 80-metre wide crater in Siberia. Photo:
AP

One of the newly-discovered holes is near the original — in a land
referred to by locals as “the end of the world”. It’s around 14
metres in diameter and formed under unknown conditions. Same goes for the other new
crater, which has a diameter of 4 metres, a depth of between 61 and 100 metres and
was discovered by “mystified”
herders near the village of Nosok in the icy Krasnoyarsk region.
“It is not like this is the work of men,” one expert explained to
the Siberian Times, which has been hot on the giant crater story from the
get-go. “But [it] also doesn’t look like natural
formation.”
Even politicians have been drawn by the brouhaha. “I flew by helicopter
to inspect this funnel on July 19,” local lawmaker Mikhail
Lapsui told the
Siberian Times, saying it looks much like the original crater,
only smaller, with a small ice lake at its base. “There is also ground
outside, as if it was thrown as a result of an underground explosion.”

Andrei Plekhanov, a researcher at the Scientific Research
Center of the Arctic, stands at the entrance to the crater. Photo: AP

Locals can’t seem to get their stories straight over what happened, he
explained. “According to local residents, the hole formed on September 27,
2013. Observers give several versions. According to the first, initially the place
was smoking and then there was a bright flash. In the second version, a celestial
body fell there.”
A bright flash? A “celestial” body? Can science help out this
mess?
“Undoubtedly, we need to study all such formations,” Marina Leibman,
the chief scientist of the Earth Cryosphere Institute, told
URA.RU. “It is necessary to be able to predict their occurrence. Each new
funnel provides additional information for scientists.”
There’s been no shortage of theories. Hypotheses have ranged
from asteroids to an underground missile explosion to global warming, a melt
of the permafrost. Scientist Anna Kurchatova, in an interview with the Siberian
Times, suggested that melting could produce an effect similar to a champagne
bottle when the cork pops, except on a giant scale.
Studies have indeed shown that the Arctic is heating up. Grist reports one
paper in the Geophysical Research Papers suggests that the region hasn’t been
so hot in the last 120,000 years. Still, even with more information than before on
the Arctic region, it remains so distant a land that it can be difficult to
get a good read on it.
“For that reason, the Arctic continually surprises
scientists,” writes
Slate’s Eric Holthaus. “Just like last week.”

A man was crushed to death when a giant crucifix dedicated to Pope John Paul
II collapsed and fell on him, ITV News reports. The accident came just days before
a historic canonization that will see the late pope declared a saint.

The 98-foot-high wooden and concrete cross fell during a ceremony in the Italian
Alpine village of Cevo on Thursday, killing 21-year-old student Marco Gusmini.
Another man was taken to hospital.
The structure was dedicated to John Paul II on his visit to the region in
1998.

Star-shaped cataracts developed in an electrician's eyes after he was
blasted by 14,000 volts of electricity through his left shoulder.
An electric current passed through his body, including the optic nerve which
connects the back of the eye to the brain, a report in the latest edition
of The New England Journal of Medicine said.
The cataracts came to medical attention when the 42-year-old man visited an eye
clinic four weeks after the accident. The vision in both his eyes had become
limited to perception of hand motions.
Four months after the accident the man had surgery to remove the cataracts and
implant a new lens.

Dr Bobby Korn, an associate
professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego,
who treated the patient, said the Californian man's vision improved slightly
after the operation, but damage to his optic nerve meant his sight remained
limited.
Now, a decade later, the man was legally blind, but was able to read with the use
of low-vision aids and to use public transport without help.
It was not fully understood why cataracts - clouding of the lens in the eye -
sometimes took on a star shape, Korn said.
In animal studies, damage to the eye lens from electricity first appears as small
bubbles on the outside of the lens. Those bubbles coalesced to form a star-shaped
cataract.
Fairfax NZ News

Cicada 3301: the internet code-breaking
mystery that has the world baffled

For the past two years, a mysterious online
organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of
seemingly unsolvable problems. But to what end?

The Circada 3301 logo.

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer
analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when
he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type,
against a black background.
"Hello," it said. "We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them,
we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it
will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that
will make it all the way through. Good luck."
The message was signed: "3301".

A self-confessed IT security "freak" and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson's
interest was immediately piqued. This was - he knew - an example of digital
steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most
often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code -
for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel - can retrieve an entirely
different image from the randomised background "noise".

It's a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing
child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned
the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting
messages inside digital photographs.
Sleepily - it was late, and he had work in the morning - Eriksson thought he'd
try his luck decoding the message from "3301". After only a few minutes work
he'd got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar" and a line of
meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher" - an
encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private
correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of
positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested
"four" might be important - and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web
address buried in the image's code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.
It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way.
Looks like you can't guess how to get the message out."
"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest," says
Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar
cipher after all. I was hooked."Three queens were buried with golden
treasures, human sacrifices.
Eriksson didn't realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the
internet's most enduring puzzles; a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of
competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical
locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the "darknet". So
far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and
classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian
occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan
numerology.
It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called
"Wind" who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in
Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what
the challenge - known as Cicada 3301 - is all about or who is behind it.
Depending on who you listen to, it's either a mysterious secret society, a
statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by
some quasi-military body. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it's the
CIA.
For some, it's just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku; for others,
it has become an obsession. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to
work out what it means for him. "It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,"
he says. "And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge."
On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy" message from the
duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables. Taking the duck's
mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption
program called OutGuess. Success: another hidden message, this time linking
to another messageboard on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Here, encrypted lines from a book were
being posted every few hours. But there were also strange symbols comprising
of several lines and dots - Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. And duly
translated, they led to another cipher.
Up until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required
any advanced skills, or suggested anything other than a single anonymous
riddle-poser having some fun. "But then it all changed," says Eriksson. "And
things started getting interesting."
Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. And the puzzles
themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters,
reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Pictures of the cicada insect -
reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs -
became a common motif.
"I knew cicadas only emerge every prime number of years - 13, or 17 - to
avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators," says Eriksson.
"It was all starting to fit together." The references became more arcane too.
The book, for example, turned out to be The Lady of the Fountain, a
poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of
pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts.
Later, the puzzle would lead him to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson -
specifically his 1992 poem "Agrippa" (a book of the dead), infamous for the
fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being
read once. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur
codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. Armies of users of 4chan, the anarchic internet forum where the
first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pooled their collective
intelligence - and endless free time - to crack the puzzles.
Within hours they'd decoded The Lady of the Fountain. The new message,
however, was another surprise: "Call us," it read, "at telephone number
214-390-9608". By this point, only a few days after the original image was
posted, Eriksson had taken time off work to join the pursuit full time.
"This was definitely an unexpected turn," he recalls. "And the first hint
that this might not just be the work of a random internet troll." Although
now disconnected, the phone line was based in Texas, and led to an answering
machine. There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the
original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime
and a new website: 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a
cicada confirmed they were on the right path.
"It was thrilling, breathtaking by now," says Eriksson. "This shared feeling
of discovery was immense. But the plot was about to thicken even more." Once
the countdown reached zero, at 5pm GMT on January 9, it showed 14 GPS
coordinates around the world: locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul,
Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. Sat in Sweden,
Eriksson waited as, around the globe, amateur solvers left their apartments
to investigate. And, one by one reported what they'd found: a poster,
attached to a lamp post, bearing the cicada image and a QR code (the
black-and-white bar code often seen on adverts these days and designed to
take you to a website via your smartphone).
"It was exhilarating," said Eriksson. "I was suddenly aware of how much
effort they must have been putting into creating this kind of challenge." For
the growing Cicada community, it was explosive - proof this wasn't merely
some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global
organisation of talented people. But who?
Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada
might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality
Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately - and disappointingly -
promote a new movie or car.
Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically
acclaimed "I Love Bees" ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo
2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the
Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.

First Unlooted Royal Tomb Unearthed in
Peru

Three
queens were buried with golden treasures, human sacrifices.

Images of winged, supernatural beings adorn a pair of heavy gold-and-silver ear
ornaments that one high-ranking Wari woman wore to her grave in the imperial
tomb at El Castillo de Huarmey. In all, the archaeological team found the
remains of 63 individuals, including three Wari queens.
(See more pictures)

It was a stunning
discovery: the first unlooted imperial tomb of the
Wari, the ancient civilization that built South
America's earliest empire between 700 and 1000 A.D. Yet it wasn't happiness
that Milosz Giersz
felt when he first glimpsed gold in the dim recesses of the burial chamber in
northern Peru.

Giersz, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw in Poland, realized at once
that if word leaked out that his Polish-Peruvian team had discovered a
1,200-year-old "temple of the dead" filled with precious gold and silver
artifacts, looters would descend on the site in droves. "I had a nightmare about
the possibility," says Giersz.

So Giersz and project co-director Roberto Pimentel Nita kept their discovery
secret. Digging quietly for months in one of the burial chambers, the
archaeologists collected more than a thousand artifacts, including sophisticated
gold and silver jewelry, bronze axes, and gold tools, along with the bodies of
three Wari queens and 60 other individuals, some of whom were probably human
sacrifices. (See more:
"First Pictures: Peru's Rare, Unlooted Royal Tomb")

Archaeologists discovered a massive carved wooden mace (foreground) protruding
from stone fill. “It was a tomb marker,” says University of Warsaw
archaeologist Milosz Giersz, who heads the team. “We knew then that we
had the main mausoleum.”
(See more pictures)

Photograph by Milosz Giersz

Peru's Minister of Culture and other dignitaries will officially announce the
discovery today at a press conference at the site. Krzysztof Makowski Hanula, an
archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of
Peru in Lima and the project's scientific adviser, said the newly unearthed
temple of the dead "is like a pantheon, like a mausoleum of all the Wari nobility
in the region."

Overlooked Empire

The Wari lords have long been overshadowed by the later Inca, whose achievements
were extensively documented by their Spanish conquerors. But in the 8th and 9th
centuries A.D., the Wari built an empire that spanned much of present-day Peru.
Their Andean capital, Huari, became one of the world's great cities. At its
zenith, Huari boasted a population conservatively estimated at about 40,000
people. Paris, by comparison, had just 25,000 residents at the time.

Just how the Wari forged this empire, whether by conquest or persuasion, is a
long-standing archaeological mystery. The sheer sophistication of Wari artwork
has long attracted looters, who have ransacked the remains of imperial palaces
and shrines. Unable to stop the destruction of vital archaeological information,
researchers were left with many more questions than answers. (Read: "Brewery
Was Burned After Ancient Peru Drinking Ritual.")

The spectacular new finds at El Castillo de Huarmey, a four-hour drive north of
Lima, will go a long way toward answering some of those questions. Although grave
robbers have been digging at the 110-acre site off and on for decades, Giersz
suspected that a mausoleum remained hidden deep underground. In January 2010, he
and a small team
scrutinized the area using aerial photography and geophysical imaging
equipment. On a ridge between two large adobe-brick pyramids, they spotted the
faint outline of what appeared to be a subterranean mausoleum.

Tomb robbers had long dumped rubble on the ridge. Digging through the rubble last
September, Giersz and his team uncovered an ancient ceremonial room with a stone
throne. Below this lay a large mysterious chamber sealed with 30 tons of loose
stone fill. Giersz decided to keep digging. Inside the fill was a huge carved
wooden mace. "It was a tomb marker," says Giersz, "and we knew then that we had
the main mausoleum."

Buried Treasure

As the archaeologists carefully removed the fill, they discovered rows of human
bodies buried in a seated position and wrapped in poorly preserved textiles.
Nearby, in three small side chambers, were the remains of three Wari queens and
many of their prized possessions, including weaving tools made of gold. "So what
were these first ladies doing at the imperial court? They were weaving cloth with
gold instruments," says Makowski.

Mourners had also interred many other treasures in the room: inlaid gold and
silver ear-ornaments, silver bowls, bronze ritual axes, a rare alabaster drinking
cup, knives, coca leaf containers, brilliantly painted ceramics from many parts of
the Andean world, and other precious objects. Giersz and his colleagues had never
seen anything like it before. "We are talking about the first unearthed royal
imperial tomb," says Giersz.

But for archaeologists, the greatest treasure will be the tomb's wealth of new
information on the Wari Empire. The construction of an imperial mausoleum at El
Castillo shows that Wari lords conquered and politically controlled this part of
the northern coast, and likely played a key role in the downfall of the northern
Moche kingdom.
Intriguingly, one vessel from the mausoleum depicts coastal warriors battling
axe-wielding Wari invaders.

The Wari also waged a battle for the hearts and minds of their new vassals. In
addition to military might, they fostered a cult of royal ancestor worship. The
bodies of the entombed queens bore traces of insect pupae, revealing that
attendants had taken them out of the funerary chamber and exposed them to the
air. This strongly suggests that the Wari displayed the mummies of their queens
on the throne of the ceremonial room, allowing the living to venerate the royal
dead. (Related:
"Mummy Bundles, Child Sacrifices Found on Pyramid.")

Analysis of the mausoleum-and other chambers that may still be buried-is only
beginning. Giersz predicts that his team has another eight to ten years of work
there. But already the finds at El Castillo promise to cast the Wari civilization
in a brilliant new light. "The Wari phenomenon can be compared to the empire of
Alexander the Great," says Makowski. "It's a brief historical phenomenon, but
with great consequence."

Guatemala Sinkhole Created by Humans, Not Nature

30-story-deep chasm not a true sinkhole, but a "piping feature."

The sinkhole appeared Sunday in downtown Guatemala City, swallowing a
three-story building.

Human activity, not nature, was the likely cause of the gaping sinkhole
that opened up in the streets of Guatemala City on Sunday, a geologist
says.
A burst sewer pipe or storm drain probably hollowed out the underground cavity that
allowed the chasm to form, according to Sam Bonis, a geologist at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire, who is currently living in Guatemala City (map).
The Guatemala City sinkhole, estimated to be 60 feet (18 meters) wide and 300 feet
(100 meters) deep, appears to have been triggered by the deluge from tropical storm
Agatha.
But the cavity formed in the first place because the city—and its underground
infrastructure—were built in a region where the first few hundred meters of
ground are mostly made up of a material called pumice fill, deposited during past
volcanic eruptions.
"Lots of times, volcanic pumice originates as a flow [of loose, gravel-like
particles], and because of the heat and the weight, it becomes welded into solid
rock," Bonis said.
"In Guatemala City [the pumice is] unconsolidated, it's loose," he said. "It hasn't
been hardened into a rock yet, so it's easily eroded, especially by swift running
water."
In general, the zoning regulations and building codes in Guatemala City are poor,
Bonis said, and the few regulations that exist are often ignored. That means leaking
pipes could have gone unfixed long enough to create the right conditions for the
sinkhole. (Related pictures:
"How Humans Can Trigger Earthquakes.")
In fact, Bonis thinks calling the Guatemala City chasm a sinkhole is a
misnomer—a true sinkhole is an entirely natural phenomenon. There is no
scientific term for what happened in Guatemala, he said, adding that he recommends
the pit be dubbed a piping feature.Guatemala Sinkhole Not a Sinkhole
Natural sinkholes generally form when heavy, water-saturated soil causes the roof of
an underground limestone cavity to collapse, or when water widens a natural fracture
in limestone bedrock.
But there is no limestone beneath the section of Guatemala City where the new
sinkhole appeared, at least not at the depth at which the hole formed, Bonis
said.
"There may be limestone thousands of meters beneath the city, but not hundreds of
meters," he said.
Instead, nature likely sped up a process set in motion by human actions. (Related:
"'Mud Volcano' in Indonesia Caused by Gas Exploration, Study Says.")
Recent eruptions of several volcanoes in Guatemala covered the city in a fresh layer
of volcanic ash. If this material got into the city's pipes and drains, it may have
clogged the passageways, making ruptures more likely, Bonis said.
Heavy rains from tropical storm Agatha may also have overloaded underground sewage or
drainage pipes, leading to a growing cavity that eventually collapsed, Bonis
speculated.
The geologist added that the new sinkhole shares remarkable similarities with a
sinkhole that formed
in Guatemala City in 2007.
"Both of these things occurred in the same general part of town. They look the same,"
he said. "It's more than a coincidence, especially if they trace" any faulty pipes
associated with the 2010 sinkhole to pipes near the 2007 sinkhole.Guatemala City Sewer Inspections a Must
The danger should not have been news to officials in Guatemala City, noted Bonis, who
used to work for the Guatemalan government's national geology institute.
As part of a volunteer team that investigated the 2007 sinkhole, Bonis co-authored a
report warning the Guatemalan government that similar holes will very likely keep
appearing unless action is taken to inspect the city's sewer system for weaknesses.
(Watch video of sewer divers in
Mexico City.)
The government never replied, Bonis said—possibly due to a lack of funds.
"There's a minimum of regulation, because that's money that the government doesn't
have," he said.
But, he added, "there's got to be ways of inspecting the sewer system. ... These are
things that have to be done.

Glowing Trees
Instead Of
Streetlights

Published: May 7, 2013

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group
of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop
plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric
streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Arabidopsis,
the first plant test subject.

Mr. Taylor, left, is lead scientist of the glowing plant project, and Mr. Evans
its manager.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called
synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for
how it is being carried out.

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be
done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of
communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap
enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement.

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted
more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors
in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter.

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing
tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that
emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one
observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room.

The new project’s goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. “We
hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark
paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0,”
the project’s Kickstarter page says.

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself synthetic
biology and to “inspire others to create new living things.” As
promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea of tinkerers
creating living things in their garages. They fear that malicious organisms may be
created, either intentionally or by accident.

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled
release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and
risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups said in their letter
demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site.

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its 4,000
contributors, making it perhaps the “first-ever intentional environmental
release of an avowedly ‘synthetic biology’ organism anywhere in the
world.” Kickstarter told the critics to take up their concerns with the
project’s organizers. The Agriculture Department has not yet replied.

Antony Evans, the manager of the glowing plant project, said in an interview that
the activity would be safe.

“What we are doing is very identical to what has been done in research
laboratories and big institutions for 20 years,” he said. Still, he added,
“We are very cognizant of the precedent we are setting” with the
do-it-yourself project and that some of the money raised would be used to explore
public policy issues.

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it
differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out of one
organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic biology typically
involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted, providing the flexibility to go
beyond the genes found in nature.

The glowing plant project is the brainchild of Mr. Evans, a technology entrepreneur
in San Francisco, and Omri Amirav-Drory, a biochemist. They met at Singularity University, a
program that introduces entrepreneurs to futuristic technology.

Dr. Amirav-Drory runs a company called Genome Compiler, which makes a program that can be used
to design DNA sequences. When the sequence is done, it is transmitted to a
mail-order foundry that synthesizes the DNA.

Kyle Taylor, who received his doctorate in molecular and cell biology at Stanford
last year, will be in charge of putting the synthetic DNA into the plant. The
research will be done, at least initially, at BioCurious, a communal laboratory in Silicon Valley that
describes itself as a “hackerspace for biotech.”

The first plant the group is modifying is Arabidopsis thaliana, part of the mustard
family and the laboratory rat of the plant world. The organizers hope to move next
to a glowing rose.

Scientists have long made glowing creatures for research purposes, including one or
more monkeys, cats,pigs, dogs and worms. Glowing zebra fish have been
sold in some aquarium shops for years.

These creatures typically have the gene for a green fluorescent protein, derived
from a jellyfish, spliced into their DNA. But they glow only when ultraviolet light
is shined on them.

Others going back to the 1980s have transplanted the gene for luciferase, an enzyme
used by fireflies, into plants. But luciferase will not work without another
chemical called luciferin. So the plants did not glow unless luciferin was
constantly fed to them. In 2010, researchers at Stony Brook University reported in
the journal Plos One that they had created a tobacco plant that glowed entirely on its own, however dimly.
They spliced into the plant all six genes from a marine bacterium necessary to
produce both luciferase and luciferin.

Alexander Krichevsky, who led that research, has started a company, BioGlow, to
commercialize glowing plants, starting with ornamental ones, since it is still
impractical to replace light bulbs.

“Wouldn’t you like your beautiful flowers to glow in the dark?”
he said, invoking the glowing foliage in the movie “Avatar.”

Dr. Krichevsky declined to provide more about the products, timetables or the
investors backing his company, which is based in St. Louis.

Whether it will ever be possible to replace light bulbs remains to be seen and
depends to some extent on how much of the plant’s energy can be devoted to
light production while still allowing the plant to grow. Mr. Evans said his group
calculated, albeit with many assumptions, that a tree that covers a ground area of
10 meters (nearly 33 feet) by 10 meters might be able to cast as much light as a
street lamp.

While the Agriculture Department regulates genetically modified plants, it does so
under a law covering plant pests.

BioGlow has already obtained a letter from the department saying that it will
not need approval to release its glowing plants because they are not plant pests,
and are not made using plant pests. The hobbyist project hopes to get the same
exemption.

Todd Kuiken, senior research associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington,
who has been studying the governance of both synthetic biology and the
do-it-yourself movement, said the glowing plant project was an ideal test case.

“It exposes the gaps and holes in the regulatory structure, while it is,
I would argue, a safe product in the grand scheme of things,” Dr. Kuiken said.
“A serious look needs to be taken at the regulatory system to see if it can
handle the questions synthetic biology is going to

Shakuntala Devi, 1929 - 2013

Indian mathematics prodigy Shakuntala Devi. Photo: Reuters

Shakuntala Devi, who has died aged 83, lacked any formal
education but possessed such an extraordinary ability to complete the most complex
mathematical calculations in double quick time that she became known as "the human
computer".
As India's most remarkable mathematical prodigy, she had astounded friends and
family with her numerical prowess since childhood. She once calculated the 23rd
root of a 201-digit number in her head in less than a minute, and in June 1980, at
Imperial College, London, accurately multiplied two random 13-digit numbers in a
few seconds.
The sum, picked at random by the computer department, was 7,686,369,774,870 x
2,465,099,745,779. After 28 seconds she correctly answered
18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730, a feat that earned her a place in the Guinness
Book of Records.
Her ability to solve complicated arithmetical problems with apparent ease and
astonishing speed had stunned observers since the 1970s, when her unexplained brain
power made even sophisticated digital devices of the day seem inadequate by
comparison. Witty and sharp-minded, she possessed exceptional powers of retention
and appeared to harness the power of several mnemonic devices in her brain.

In 1988 she visited the United
States, where the educational psychologist Professor Arthur Jensen tried to unlock
the secret of her abilities. At Stanford University he monitored her performance in
several mathematical tasks involving large numbers and subjected her to a series of
tests.
When volunteers wrote problems on a blackboard, Shakuntala Devi would turn around,
stare at the problem and come up with the right answer, always in less than a
minute. According to Jensen, in a research study published in the journal
Intelligence in 1990: "Devi solved most of the problems faster than I was able to
copy them in my notebook."
Jensen set her two problems, the cube root of 61,629,875, and the seventh root of
170,859,375. Shakuntala Devi gave the correct answers - 395 and 15 - even before
Jensen's wife could start the stopwatch.
The study explored whether Shakuntala Devi's feats derived from some innate ability
to manipulate large numbers or from practice. Her reaction times on simple
cognitive tasks such as picking the odd man out were unexceptional, and contrasted
sharply with her speed at arithmetical calculations.
Jensen suggested that she perceived large numbers differently from others. "For a
calculating prodigy like Devi, the manipulation of numbers is apparently like a
native language, whereas for most of us, arithmetic calculation is at best like the
foreign language we learnt at school," he wrote. He believed that some
"motivational factor" that drives and sustains "enormous and prolonged interest and
practice" might explain her extreme levels of skill.
Shakuntala Devi was born on November 4 1929 in Bangalore into an orthodox Brahmin
family. Her father, refusing to follow the family priestly tradition, became a
circus performer, excelling in trapeze, tightrope, lion taming and human cannonball
acts.
When she was three, Shakuntala began exhibiting precocious skill with numbers, and
by the time she was five, could calculate cube roots. A year later she amazed
mathematicians at Mysore University with her ability to solve complex mathematical
problems in her head. But she had no conventional schooling, mainly on account of
her father's travels with the circus, and even went short of food.
She claimed to have joined a convent at the age of 10, but to have been expelled
within three months because her parents were unable to pay the fees.
While growing up in a run-down area of Bangalore, Shakuntala was able to retain
large numbers of digits in her memory. This singular talent came to wider attention
when she beat one of the world's fastest computers by 10 seconds in a complicated
calculation.
"Numbers have life, they're not just symbols on paper," she once said. "I cannot
transfer my abilities to anyone, but I can think of quicker ways with which to help
people develop numerical aptitude."
A daughter survives her.The Daily Telegraph, UK

Last week, spiders descended in droves upon a town in southern Brazil —
literally.
When 20-year-old web designer Erick Reis left a friend’s house on Sunday, he
saw what looked like thousands of spiders overhead, reported G1, a Brazilian news
site, on Feb. 8. The large, sturdy spiders were hanging from power lines and poles,
and crawling around on a vast network of silk strands spun over the town of Santo
Antonio da Platina.
Reis did what many of us might do: He pulled out his camera and shot a video of
spiders seemingly falling from the sky.
As creeptastic is it may be, “The phenomenon observed is not really
surprising,” said Leticia Aviles, who studies social spiders at the University of British
Columbia. “Either social or colonial spiders may occur in large aggregations,
as the one shown in the video.” The reason, she and others say, is simple: This
is how they hunt. An early report suggested the swarming spiders were
Anelosimus eximius, a social species of spider that weaves communal
webs, lives together as adults, and shares childcare duties.
However, it appears that initial assessment may be wrong. The spiders in the video
are more likely a species of colonial spider that aggregates individual webs and
lives in groups only temporarily, dispersing before reproducing, Aviles said.
“The spiders I saw in the video are not Anelosimus eximius,” said
Deborah
Smith, an entomologist at the University of Kansas who specializes in social
spiders. She notes that A. eximius is a bit smaller than the arachnids Reis
filmed, and may not live that far south. “The spiders in the video are very
large and robust,” she said. “It might be worth looking at Parawixia
bistriata, a large, group-living orb weaver, to see if that one fits the
bill.”
Arachnologist George Uetz agrees. “This is definitely not Anelosimus
eximius,” said Uetz, who studies spiders at the University of Cincinnati.
He notes that the spiders appear to be spread out on a colonial network of individual
orb webs (rather than building a communal nest) and resemble big, orb-weaving spiders
— perhaps Parawixia bistriata. “This colony is quite
large,” he said, noting that the spiders aren’t actually raining down.
“The web is fixed, although it is very fine and mostly invisible,” he
said.
Cornell University arachnologist Linda Rayor and Aviles also agree that what’s probably being
filmed is a massive P. bistriata colony. That species lives in South American
savannas and spins colonial webs. A bit of good news is that their venom is not
believed to be harmful to humans, Uetz said.
If this is Parawixia, or a similar species, there’s a reason the spiders
may have appeared to come out of nowhere. “At night, they all collect in a
colonial retreat, probably out of sight in a tree,” Uetz said. ”Then
they build the colonial framework early in the day, and build individual webs upon
it. They sit on these webs and capture prey.”
Whether the spiders are setting up camp or dispersing is an open question. It’s
possible that Reis caught the conglomerate just as they had moved in to a new home
— in which case he’ll see spiders in the sky whenever he visits his
friends. At least for as long as insects are plentiful and the neighborhood is safe
from birds, or until it’s time to reproduce. P. bistriata colonies
dissolve before the spiders make more spiders, Aviles said. When they are clumped
together, the groups tend to comprise single families.
“I suppose those can be quite large,” Aviles said. “Or, in some
cases, multiple families may remain aggregated, giving rise to a colony as huge as
the one shown in the video.”
It’s also possible the spiders were caught in the act of dispersing, and that
the massive web overhead is temporary, though that’s more likely if the spiders
are, in fact, Anelosimus eximius. An easy to make a determine which species
they are is to look for the presence of an orb web, which would point toward
Parawixia, Aviles said. Or better yet, snap a close-up photo of one of the
spiders. Any volunteers?

Spider That
Builds Its Own Spider Decoys Discovered

A decoy spider hangs below its much smaller builder, suspected to be a new
species in the genus Cyclosa. Photo: Phil Torres.

A spider that builds elaborate, fake spiders and hangs them in its web has been
discovered in the Peruvian Amazon.
Believed to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa, the arachnid crafts the
larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. Though Cyclosa includes
other sculpting arachnids, this is the first one observed to build a replica with
multiple, spidery legs.
Scientists suspect the fake spiders serve as decoys, part of a defense mechanism
meant to confuse or distract predators. “It seems like a really well evolved
and very specialized behavior,” said Phil Torres, who described the
find in a
blog entry written for Rainforest Expeditions. Torres, a biologist and science
educator, divides his time between Southern California and Peru, where he’s
involved in research and education projects.
“Considering that spiders can already make really impressive geometric designs
with their webs, it’s no surprise that they can take that leap to make an
impressive design with debris and other things,” he said.
In September, Torres was leading visitors into a floodplain surrounding Peru’s
Tambopata Research
Center, located near the western edge of the Amazon. From a distance, they
saw what resembled a smallish, dead spider in a web. It looked kind of flaky, like
the fungus-covered corpse of an arthropod.
But then the flaky spider started moving.
A closer looked revealed the illusion. Above the 1-inch-long decoy sat a much smaller
spider. Striped, and less than a quarter-inch long, the spider was shaking the
web. It was unlike anything Torres had ever seen. “It blew my mind,”
he said.
So Torres got in touch with arachnologist Linda Rayor of Cornell University who
confirmed the find was unusual. “The odds are that this [species] is
unidentified,” she said, “and even if it has been named, that this
behavior hasn’t previously been reported.” Rayor notes that while more
observations are necessary to confirm a new species, decoys with legs — and the
web-shaking behavior — aren’t common in known Cyclosa.
“That’s really kind of cool,” she said.
Afterward, Torres returned to the trails near the research center. Only within a
roughly 1-square-mile area near the floodplain did Torres find more spider-building
spiders — about 25 of them. “They could be quite locally
restricted,” he said. “But for all I know, there’s millions of them
in the forest beyond.” The spiders’ webs were crafted around face-height,
near the trail, and about the width of a stretched-out hand. Some of the decoys
placed in the webs looked rather realistic. Others resembled something more like a
cartoon octopus.
“I have never seen a structure just like this,” said
William Eberhard, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
and University of Costa Rica who studies spiders and web-building.

Photo: Phil Torres.

Though Cyclosa are known for building decoys, most of the described
spiders’ constructions are clumpy, made out of multiple little balls built from
egg sacs, debris or prey, rather than something resembling an actual spider.
“Known Cyclosa don’t have that spider-with-leg looking thing,
which is why we think it’s a new species,” Torres said.
But without a permit to collect any organisms, anatomical confirmation of the new
species is on hold. Torres is returning to the site in January, and will be able to
collect some spiders then. Eberhard notes that identifying a new species based on the
decoy-building behavior alone is probably not possible. “Species are
distinguished on the basis of the structure of the male and female genitalia,”
he said. “To a lesser extent, on the overall abdomen shape.”

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Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts.Moynihan

'When we follow the money trail up through the pyramid of world power, past the corporations, past the corrupt politicians, past the front groups and past the mainstream media propagandist – we always find it leads to the Rothschild Banking Cartel, which is sitting quietly at the top, well behind the scenes'.